Failure
by CantilenaCait
Summary: Obi-Wan's reaction to Anakin, Mustafar, and the fall of the Republic. A long-ish drabble.


**A/N: This is my first fic on here, so please be nice! I'm fairly new to the Star Wars fandom (as in I watched the films for the first time a couple of months ago) so please excuse any errors/OOC-ness, and point them out to me. In my head, I imagine Obi-Wan having a hell of a lot of guilt and emotional conflict after the events of RoTS (I mean, how could he not?) and I thought it could be quite interesting to explore those emotions a little further. This is set directly after RoTS, so before he learns about Darth Vader's survival; as I was writing this, I saw it as taking place a few days after Mustafar. Constructive criticism is welcome, flames/rudeness less so.**

* * *

Shock. Anger. Disappointment. Guilt. Grief.

A Jedi shouldn't feel these things. _There is no emotion, there is only peace_.

I should be better than this. I should be able to release my emotions into the Force, like I've always been taught to. I should be able to just slip back behind my calm, everyday mask.

But I can't. Every time I try, I see those yellow eyes looking at me with such hatred. I see a monster writhing and covered in flame, shrieking 'I HATE YOU' over and over and over.

And then I'm drowning in the tide of _shockangerdisappointmentguiltgrief _that floods over me, too strong and too deep for me to stay afloat.

Occasionally, when my mind shows me the events that took place on that Sith-forsaken planet, his eyes are blue. Not the yellow that makes it easier to accept that he's gone, the yellow that allows me to pretend that the monster I fought wasn't my apprentice, my best friend, my brother, my son. No, it shows me the clear cerulean that was always filled with hope, with love and loyalty and such raw _emotion_, with laughter and a blatant disregard for the rules, with intelligence and the belief that any problem could be solved.

There was a time when those eyes inspired such pride in me. The Chosen One. The slave boy I had watched grow into a magnificent Jedi. The warrior who had saved countless lives during the Clone Wars. The Order's poster boy. The Republic's hero.

Now, they just reminded of all that I'd lost.

That carefree boy, who had skipped meditation lessons in order to sneak off to practice his 'saber skills, who had gained a reputation for precociousness and a disregard for rules within six months of his arrival at the Temple, was gone. The boy I raised, the boy I trained, the boy I loved; gone, snatched from me by fire and flame and hate. Killed by Palpatine, by his love for Padme, by the Order's fear of him, by the Council's refusal to recognise his skill.

Killed by me.

Killed by my failure to give him what he needed, my failure to teach him the dangers of attachment (how could I, when he could clearly feel my attachment for him across the bond that _I _refused to snap when he was knighted?) my failure to realise that the orthodox Jedi training wouldn't be sufficient for him, my failure to be the friend-father-brother he needed. My failure to notice the signs that he was slipping, my failure to notice the change in the behaviour of the man I professed to know better than myself.

Should I even call myself a Jedi?

I let the Order down when I let my apprentice down. When he fell, he dragged thousands of years of tradition and history with him, staining the Temple walls red before letting them fall to earth with a crash that echoed across the galaxy, shouting out: _The Jedi are no more. _

All those lives lost. Mace Windu. Plo Koon. Vokara Che. Probably even Yoda, the only one of us who had any chance of bringing balance back. Of course, that was the Chosen One's duty. Before he destroyed everything.

Before I let him destroy everything.

But I stopped him.

After all the mistakes I've made, at least I did one thing right.

I stopped him before he could cause any more damage, before his insane ideas of power came to fruition.

I only wish I'd stopped him earlier. I only wish I'd noticed the signs, realised what Palpatine was doing to him. I should have heeded my distrust of our esteemed Chancellor, the coldness I felt whenever he was around. I should have noticed when he began taking my ex-Padawan aside more frequently, should have given the growing attachment between them more thought.

I just put it down to his growing frustration with the Council, the Order, even me.

I know now that that's exactly what it was.

While we were trying to curb him, Palpatine was promising to release the reins.

And when he pulled free, the world fell into disarray.

The Republic is gone.

Everything I knew, everything I fought for, everything I loved. Snatched away from me by lust and greed and hate.

I stopped him, but in the end I was too late.

And that's yet another failure that I have to live with.

Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ex-Jedi Master. Ex-Negotiator. The man who watched his world burn.


End file.
